If Ordinary People Can Handle This, Why Aren’t We Asking Them?

23-09-2026

23.09.2026 13:00

From The Hague to a Swiss ballot box, citizens keep proving they can make hard climate decisions. Democracy International’s Citizens for Climate project wants to make that the rule, not the exception.

On the first Monday of December 2025, a group of people who had never asked to be politicians walked into the Dutch parliament and handed the prime minister their advice on how the Netherlands should eat, shop and travel. There were 175 of them, aged between 17 and 87, drawn by lot from some 4,000 people who had answered an invitation letter. They had spent seven weekends arguing in sessions over a single question: how can we, as a country, eat, use goods and travel in ways that are better for the climate?

Nobody expected miracles. Climate policy in Europe is where good intentions go to be watered down. Yet on 29 May 2026 the cabinet announced it would immediately adopt 41 of the assembly’s 82 proposals, from a trade-in scheme for used electric cars to a lobbying register, and take another eighteen into further study. MPs received technical briefings on the response on 10 September. In December the citizens reconvene to check who kept their word.

Half is not everything. Critics pointed out that several “adopted” measures were already in the pipeline, and some of the boldest ideas were rejected: a 25 per cent organic farming target was declared unachievable. But step back and something remarkable has happened. A random slice of a divided society, deliberately including people sceptical of climate policy, sat down together and produced a package that a government felt obliged to answer, item by item, in public.

More than elections

This is precisely what Democracy International has spent years arguing for. Our mission statement is blunt: we works toward “a world in which people hold final political power.” Democracy, in our view, “is more than elections.” Every citizen should have “the right, the capacity and the responsibility to shape the society they live in.”

Crucially, referendums, citizens’ initiatives and assemblies should not be seen as rivals to parliament. “They are not a replacement of democratic representation, they are an enrichment.” When people own a decision, the argument runs, the result is “more thought-through, innovative, inclusive and accepted,” and government becomes more accountable. Strong, inclusive democracies, are an antidote to rising populism and mistrust.

Nowhere is that argument tested harder than on climate. The transition asks people to change how they heat their homes, what they drive and what they eat. Decisions made over their heads tend to meet the fate of France’s fuel-tax rise in 2018: yellow vests on the roundabouts. Decisions made with people can travel further. The record of the past decade shows both what works and where it goes wrong.

The cautionary tale

France tried on a grand scale. Out of the gilets jaunes crisis came the Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat: 150 randomly selected citizens, meeting from October 2019 to June 2020, with a mandate to find ways of cutting emissions by at least 40 per cent by 2030 “in a spirit of social justice.” The government promised their proposals would go to parliament, to a referendum or into regulation “sans filtre” – unfiltered.

The citizens delivered 149 proposals. Then the filter appeared. President Macron vetoed three outright: a 110 km/h motorway limit, a tax on dividends and a rewrite of the constitution’s preamble. Others were diluted on the way through. A proposed end to domestic flights wherever a train could do the job became a ban on a handful of routes under two and a half hours. The promised constitutional referendum never happened. In February 2021, asked to grade the government’s follow-through, the convention’s members gave it 3.3 out of 10.

The lesson was not that citizens cannot do climate policy; their proposals were widely praised as coherent and ambitious. It was that a promise is not a mechanism. Without rules binding those in power to respond, deliberation ends in disappointment, which is arguably worse for trust than never having asked.

Getting the plumbing right

Ireland showed the alternative. In autumn 2017 the Irish Citizens’ Assembly, 99 people recruited door to door, spent two weekends on climate. The results confounded the assumption that voters will never accept costs: 80 per cent said they would be willing to pay higher taxes on carbon-intensive activities, 89 per cent backed a tax on greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, and 100 per cent said the state should take a leadership role. Their report was taken up by a dedicated parliamentary body, the Joint Committee on Climate Action, which produced a cross-party report that responded to the Assembly’s recommendations and developed them further. The Dáil subsequently declared a climate emergency, the government launched its 2019 Climate Action Plan, and a successor climate committee was established in the next Dáil. The channel from citizens’ room to lawbook had been built.

Brussels went further and made it permanent. Since 2023, the Brussels-Capital Region has hosted what its designers describe as the world’s first permanent citizens’ assembly on climate: 100 randomly drawn residents per cycle, with 25 members of each cycle choosing the theme for the next. The government must formally respond after three months and again after a year, and explain in writing anything it declines to implement. Three cycles in – housing and energy, food, the sharing economy – the assembly’s food proposals are flowing into the region’s 2026 Good Food strategy. It is participation as infrastructure rather than as a one-off event.

When the people vote

Deliberation is one half of the toolkit; the ballot is the other. Switzerland offers an interesting example of how citizens can shape climate policy through different instruments of direct democracy.

In June 2021, Swiss voters narrowly rejected a revised CO₂ Act, with 51.6 per cent voting against and 48.4 per cent in favour. But this did not put an end to the debate over Switzerland’s climate policy.

A separate process had already begun in 2019, when citizens submitted the Glacier Initiative. It called for Switzerland to reach net zero by 2050 and proposed ending the use of fossil fuels by that date. The Federal Council and Parliament considered this approach too far-reaching, particularly the proposed ban on fossil fuels. Parliament therefore developed an alternative: the Climate and Innovation Act. It kept the goal of climate neutrality by 2050 but pursued it without a general ban on fossil fuels.

Parliament adopted the new law in September 2022, and the organisers of the Glacier Initiative conditionally withdrew their initiative in response. But the story did not end there. Opponents of the new law collected enough signatures to trigger a referendum, meaning voters would have the final say.

On 18 June 2023, 59.1 per cent voted in favour of the initial Climate and Innovation Act. The law established the goal of net zero by 2050 and provided CHF 3.2 billion in funding.

The process illustrates how direct and representative democracy can interact. Citizens put an issue on the political agenda through a popular initiative. Parliament responded by developing an alternative. When opponents challenged that law through a referendum, the decision went back to the electorate. In the end, citizens were involved not only in raising the issue, but also in deciding the outcome.

Citizens for Climate

The lesson across these stories is not that Europe has finally discovered the perfect democratic tool. It is almost the opposite. What works in Brussels may fail in Budapest; what brings people into the room in Denmark may not work in Poland. Institutions differ, political cultures differ, and so do the people who are usually missing from the conversation.

That is the territory Citizens for Climate is exploring. Running from 2026 to 2027, it brings together partners in Germany, France, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Belgium and Denmark to search for practices worth sharing – and to ask the harder question of why they work where they do.

Because “best practice” is a dangerous phrase if it means copy and paste. A citizens’ assembly cannot simply be lifted out of Brussels and dropped into another political system. But parts of it might travel: the way participants are recruited, the effort made to reach people who rarely participate, the information citizens receive, the connection to policymakers, or the obligation to explain what happens afterwards.

That is what the Climate Participation Booklet will collect: not a single recipe for climate democracy, but practices and lessons that others can adapt.

Seven countries will produce seven different answers. That is the point. The question is not which country has solved participation. It is what they can learn from one another.

The project’s slogan is “Stronger democracy. Better climate action.” The order matters. The 175 Dutch citizens, the 99 Irish, the Brussels hundred, the Swiss majority – none of them were experts. They were asked, informed and trusted with a real decision, and they rose to it. The question that leaves for every European government is a simple one: if ordinary people can handle this, what is your reason for not asking them?

Sources

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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or CERV. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.